InDesign and Photoshop have a lot of very similar features, but InDesign is really geared toward creating multi-page documents. If you want to have a go at designing and creating your own photography portfolio, there should be nothing stopping you from doing it with InDesign CS3. Mike McHugh tells you why you should get out of your comfort zone in Photoshop and try your hand at using another great component of the Adobe Creative Suite.

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It’s hard to believe, but InDesign CS3 does do some things better than
the mighty Photoshop does. If a photographer wants to design an album, a
template, or even a portfolio of some description, InDesign is the best product
in the Adobe Creative Suite to go with. If you are worried about how InDesign
handles color, don’t be. InDesign CS3 has the exact same color management
setup as Photoshop CS3 and indeed, you can synchronize your Creative Suite color
settings using Adobe Bridge CS3. Any images will experience a smooth transition
from Photoshop to InDesign, and then on to print, to the Internet, or even to a
multi-page .PDF.

You can use InDesign to create a template that a photographer can use to
easily load images into and update at the drag and drop of a hat.

So get out of your comfort zone in Photoshop and try your hand at another
great component in the Adobe Creative Suite.

1. Set Up the InDesign Document

You’ll create a portfolio type document, so you want it to be 1024 x
768 pixels. However, you don’t have the choice of working in pixels in
InDesign. Instead, you can use points (see the New Document dialog box shown in
Figure 1). Points work out the same as pixels at 72ppi in Photoshop. To better
fit a majority of full-size landscape format images, you’ll create a wide
landscape format document.

There is no real need to create a facing pages document at this point unless
you want to create a book, in which you need to create different layouts to suit
left and right pages. It’s a great time to set some margins for your
document. Later on, you can create a grid that fits inside the margins.

If you like your layout to be a little less structured (think anarchy),
don’t worry. Make the number of pages 10, so that there is plenty of room
to add images. (Of course, if you want to add or delete pages from the document
later on, it’s easy to do.)

Figure 1 Create a new
document in InDesign to suit your onscreen display.